November 22, 2011

$ crontab -e
no crontab for flexman - using an empty one
crontab: installing new crontab
"/tmp/crontab.XXXXyiIUqY":1: premature EOF
errors in crontab file, can't install.
Do you want to retry the same edit? n
crontab: edits left in /tmp/crontab.XXXXyiIUqY

you cannt solve using crontab -e "userid" but you need to enter the carriage return at the end of the line.
cron is actually looking for end of the line after each cron.